Before performing a conventional orthopedic surgery, the surgeon would first observe images of the patient's affected bones obtained through X-ray photography or computerized tomography (CT), and then determines the manner of performing the surgery according to the surgeon's personal knowledge in anatomy and expertise in clinical surgery. Since lack of a precision guide as an aid for the surgery, it is difficult for the surgeon to precisely follow the preoperative planning and to perform the surgery. Therefore, the following four problems are found in the conventional orthopedic surgeries:
(1) the preoperative diagnosis and surgical path planning is less precise. In the event tissues nearby the affected part or the invasive path are injured, the patient is subject to serious impairment and complication caused by such imprecise diagnosis and surgical path planning. Further, if the surgeon fails to precisely indicate a relative position of the affected part, invasive path, and the surrounding tissues, the surgeon is frequently compelled to abandon the surgery.
(2) Due to the imprecise surgical path planning, a larger incision is usually made on the affected part of the patient's body to allow possible errors in the incision or to allow possible errors in the planned position at where an implant is to be implanted. Besides, the surgical instrument is invaded into the affected part via the incision. However, such errors would bring injury or impairment to the patient and even cause uncompensated serious injury. In recent years, the concept of minimal invasive surgery has been gradually adopted to various kinds of clinical surgeries. When the surgical incision or wound becomes smaller and smaller, the allowable errors in the invasive position and the surgical path are also reduced to further limit the use of the conventional surgical instruments.
(3) Experienced orthopedic surgeons are required to plan the invasive position and invasive path before the operations. Therefore, it would be difficult to control the surgical quality, such as the precision, safety and reliability of the surgery, when the surgery is performed by a surgeon with less experience.
(4) There are insufficient patient defect-related teaching models to serve as a learning aid in surgical teaching. Conventionally, since the performance of surgical procedures mostly relies on doctors' personal experiences, the surgical teaching can only be implemented through clinical teaching without assistance from related models of patients' deficiencies.
In brief, the conventional orthopedic operations mostly rely on surgeons' clinical experiences and suffer from imprecise, unsafe, and unreliable problems thereof. Further, there is no useful tool for determining the relation between the affected part and nearby tissues, rendering the whole surgical process to high uncertainty. It is therefore long felt need to develop a technique that can increase the precision, safety, and reliability of surgical operations and to reduce the surgical failure rate without highly relying on surgeons' personal clinical experience, such that the pressure of the surgeons in the clinical surgery can be relieved.